Friday, March 11, 2016

None Of Hillary's Emails Were Marked Classified

Here's a little (and incomplete) primer on classification markings. Each paragraph in a classified document is marked with a letter inside parentheses at the beginning. Like so.

(S) This paragraph contains secret information.

(U) This paragraph does not contain secret information.

Now this is where it gets tricky and I have to use a little scientific and technical jargon with you. I hope you can keep up. Feel free to ask questions in the comments.

These days, documents are what we call "electronic." They can be "edited" using a special machine called a "computer." We can even delete individual characters to change information contained in a paragraph. For example, we can delete the first three characters of each paragraph in the example above and end up with this.

This paragraph contains secret information.

This paragraph does not contain secret information.

Note that the paragraph containing secret information is still considered classified, but it's no longer marked as classified. If someone, say, a henchman, perhaps, had access to a "computer" and deleted the initial three characters of each paragraph and then emailed them to Hillary, Hillary would receive classified information, but none of it would be marked classified.

So, in summary, it is possible for two seemingly contradictory things to be true at the same time.

Hillary Clinton did not receive any emails marked classified and

Hillary Clinton is guilty of thousands of crimes, put the nation at risk, betrayed all of us to sworn enemies and deserves to spend the rest of her life in a maximum security prison sharing a cell with a violent lesbian named Big Flo.

The thing that mystifies me about this whole business, is why *anyone* would entrust *anything* even slightly confidential to unencrypted email. I've been told over and over by my friends who work with computer security that email is about as secure as passing unsealed notes across a crowded room. Without strong encryption you might just as well shout information from the hilltops as entrust it to email, and even with encryption the unencrypted plaintext can't be stored *anywhere* if you want to keep it secure.

So why is the Department of State even allowing email, at all, for any but the most innocuous and public-knowledge messages?

Well, yes, but didn't the official state department servers have a major data breach a while back? I don't really see how, given the inherent security problems of email, anybody at the state department has any business using even "official" email.